By Humberto Márquez
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, Mar 22 2005 (IPS)

“We are demanding legal title to our land. We want to preserve it as we see fit, with its plants, water and animals, and we are going to fight in a constituent assembly for that,” Anacleto Supayabe, an indigenous community leader in Bolivia, where land disputes rage, told IPS.

He and around 20 other men and women of the Yuracaré-Mojeño ethnic group from the Amazon jungle have come to the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz to address the delegates of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from 30 developing countries who are taking part in a conference organised by the International Land Coalition.

Formerly known as the Popular Coalition to Eradicate Hunger and Poverty, the International Land Coalition works together with the rural poor to increase their secure access to natural resources, especially land, and to enable them to participate directly in policy and decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods at local, national, regional and international levels.

“Why are we fighting the transnational oil, mining or logging corporations? Because they are destroying the earth: to produce gold they have polluted the water with cyanide, lime and mercury, or they install a gas pipeline with no benefits going to the indigenous people,” says Supayabe, who is wearing a Chicago White Sox baseball cap to protect himself from the fierce sun.

Bolivia is facing ongoing social and political unrest, with an alliance of leftist political parties, indigenous groups and trade unions staging road blockades and protests to demand a 50 percent tax on the sales of the foreign oil companies operating in the country, and a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

The current social upheaval broke out early this month over Bolivia’s natural gas reserves, the second largest in South America after Venezuela’s.

But indigenous and labour groups continued their protests, blocking truck traffic around the country and prompting Mesa to attempt to call early elections last week, a proposal that was rejected by parliament.

Another longstanding source of conflict in Bolivia is the land question. In some cases, different groups – stockbreeders, large, medium and small farmers, oil, mining and forestry companies, municipal, state and national governments, or indigenous communities – lay claim to the same land.

There are instances where indigenous communities “have laid claim to up to one million hectares (10.000 square kilometres) of Amazon jungle for around 2,000 families,” Miguel Urioste, director of the Fundación Tierra, told IPS.

Urioste said these claims are encouraged by the ease with which “latifundia” – great landed estates – were formed in the past in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, when the state granted, free of charge, huge extensions of land (up to 100,000 hectares) to virtually anyone who presented an investment project.

By contrast, mainly indigenous campesinos barely eke out a living on small over-exploited plots of land in the Andean altiplano and highland valleys of western Bolivia, which hundreds of thousands of rural residents have fled to seek a better life in the east or in Bolivia’s cities.

In between the highlands and the lowlands is the semi-tropical coca-growing Chapare region.

The rural exodus has also kept the land question alive at the centre of the debate over Bolivia’s future, because the new inhabitants of the slums of La Paz and the vast nearby working-class city of El Alto are former campesinos who maintain close ties to their home communities in the altiplano.

Labour unions and civil society sectors in El Alto are at the centre of the civil unrest.

In Santa Cruz, meanwhile, a movement in favour of autonomy for the province – visible in the numerous green and white flags, buildings and taxis – is largely an expression of the interests of large landowners, cattle breeders and soy farmers.

Pointing out that the state has the power to recognise ancestral land claims by indigenous communities, one of the proposals put forth by the Santa Cruz landholders is for the state to accept, in place of title deeds, mortgage documents that private banks have accepted when extending them credit.

Also involved in land conflicts are the coca farmers of the region of Chapare, who actively defend their farming activities in the face of the U.S.-sponsored policies for the eradication of illegal drug crops.

In addition, the Movimiento de Campesinos Sin Tierra (Landless Campesinos Movement), inspired by Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), is active in the struggle for land reform.

And in Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region, several associations of indigenous communities are fighting for their right to land, not with the aim of farming, but to preserve it as an area where they can live according to their own traditions.

“We are setting forth our right to 100,000 hectares along the Ichilo river,” David Góngora, another leader of the Yuracaré-Mojeño indigenous community, commented to IPS.

“But we will only use for agriculture the plots that each family needs in order to make a living. The rest will be used according to our customs and traditions: for gathering honey and fruits, or to hunt, while the water and the forests will be protected.”

If the state recognises their claim to the property in question, the communities would have the obligation to draw up a plan for managing the forests, noted engineer Ana Betancourt with the Centre for Intermediate Technology, a community development organisation.

Land ownership “can be a route to obtaining more resources, because along the banks of the Ichilo river we now make do with very little,” activist Elizabeth Chapi told IPS. “We survive with traditional medicine, based on herbal remedies, because we have no other medicines, and no doctor. We would be happy just to have a nurse.”

The central focus of the demands of the Yuracaré-Mojeño Indians is land that has been granted in concessions to logging, oil and mining companies in the Yapacaní municipality, which covers 12,000 square kilometres, over half of which are forestry reserves.

The local indigenous communities, who are laying claim to the entire western part of the municipality, have also forged alliances with around 33,000 settlers – Colla Indians who have come down from the highlands and mestizos or people of mixed-race inheritance – who have occupied the southern one-third of the district.

“It’s true that a huge number of external forces loom over the territories claimed by the indigenous people, but the Bolivian state lacks the capacity to guarantee the rights over land of each one of the actors involved,” Erwin Melgar, an adviser to the Ministry of Sustainable Development, told IPS.

“Previous governments practically parcelled out the entire territory, and the current administration does not have the capacity to enforce guidelines, because of the crisis of governability. So it will be necessary to wait for a constituent assembly to establish clear rules and secure a commitment from all Bolivians,” added Melgar.

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